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Re: [OM] [OT] Seagate "Barracuda" HDs

Subject: Re: [OM] [OT] Seagate "Barracuda" HDs
From: Moose <olymoose@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 30 Mar 2009 14:25:53 -0700
Joel Wilcox wrote:
> Forgive the OT on hard drives.  It looks like 1 TB hard drives have become 
> fixed around $99 in a lot of places.  I noticed my local brick and mortar 
> Best Buy had a 1.5 TB drive for $139 that I thought I might spring for.  It's 
> a Seagate "Barracuda" and I wondered if anyone has had any problems with 
> latest generation Seagate HDs.  I'm looking for an additional internal drive, 
> not an external backup per se.  Thanks.
>   

I have two of those 1.5TB Seagate Barracudas. One is internal and one is 
external, to BU the internal one.

There have been reports of troubles with using them in various sorts of 
high capacity arrays and perhaps with Macs or certian versions of the 
Mac OS. Seagate has made firmware revisions available for those who have 
those troubles. As far as I know, there have been no reports of trouble 
with Windoze.

I think all the troubles are related to spin down for energy efficiency. 
Apparently the timing can crash into data array OSs. I have noticed that 
sometimes when I do something that accesses my internal one that there 
is a couple of seconds (seems like forever ... ) delay as it spins up. 
When using it for it's primary function, image storage, as when 
processing images, using PS, etc., I never seem to have any delays. 
Apparently the time delay before spin down is longer than the time 
between uses when I'm doing that stuff.

As to reliability, I've had lots of Barracudas of various sorts over the 
years, several WDs and a couple of Maxtors. The only failure I've had 
was a WD that died during initial formatting. I suspect they are all 
pretty much the same in likelihood of failure.

I'm with Chuck on the strategy of using cheap consumer drives and 
backing up regularly. They tend to become obsolete either operationally, 
as capacities and file sizes increase, or functionally, as interfaces 
change, before they fail. My backup 1.5TB is inserted in the 'toaster' 
when I'm backing up that drive and the toaster is turned off when not in 
use. So the backup drive is only ever on for a few minutes at a time and 
will never accumulate any significant number of operating hours. Same 
thing with the other, smaller backup drives.

Moose
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